HaDuino: Open Your Beer Using Arduino

Frankly we’re tired of Arduino having a bad name here at Hackaday. So [Brian Benchoff] came up with a way to make it useful to a wider audience. His creation, which we call the HaDuino, lets you use the Arduino clone to open a tasty bottle of beer.

This is an absolutely beautiful board. Click on the image to the left for a high-res view. [Brian] did a fantastic job with the pixellated logo on the back of the board. The top includes some of his snarky comments to help you with populating the components. Beware of the decoupling capacitors on either side of the chip. We think it’s probably a bad idea to use 1k resistors as indicated in those footprints. (Brian’s edit: I screwed up the labels. They’re fixed in the current version) This isn’t the only thing wrong with the design so make sure you keep reading.

Your eyes have probably already picked out the Open Hardware logo. We like to hold open source as a core concept and have made the design files available at our GitHub repository. Hardware is weird to track with Git, but if you are planning to monkey with the board we’d love it if you forked just so other readers (us included) can see the cool stuff you come up with.

This is a farce

As much as we love the idea, the PCB broke after opening just one bottle of beer. The image above shows the broken populated board next to a pristine copy. But since we thought the idea was hilarious we kept going with the video. All three of the demonstration bottles had the caps “loosened” before filming. In fact you can see the key chain with a bottle opener on it in some of the shots. While we’re spilling the beans, these bottles didn’t even have beer in them. We simply filled empties with water and capped them with a black capper which you can also see in some of the shots. We did this because we’re not in the habit of drinking in the middle of the day. To top that off, this isn’t even an Arduino clone, as we made the lights flash by programming bare metal on the ATmega168.

But enough blabbering. The concept of a PCB shape that can reliably open a bottle of beer isn’t all that far-fetched. We think part of the problem is lack of an appropriately place fulcrum. Also, a more robust protrusion needs to be designed to latch on the underside of the cap. Because the design files are available, this is just screaming for someone to hack up a better version. What are you waiting for?

The reason behind the lack of copper there is to prevent a short. I’ve got VCC and ground planes on both sides, and if you’re using them as a wrench against a metal object… I don’t know what would happen.

Or pulling a pin on the ATmega low so it can I2C an xbee to wirelessly trigger another to push a command via an emulated USB HID to a Raspberry PI which can play a wav through the analogue audio out to be displayed on a salvaged oscilloscope display that is being tracked by a beaglebone running openCV to detect the change and then blah blah OPEN MY BEER ALREADY

Dudes,
Even if you don’t put a bo’l o’ner on it. I’d love to have a professionally made AVR PCB with The Jolly Wrencher (TJW) on it! Will the Evil Overlords make them and sell them on their website? That could draw more business to them. (Just don’t overdo the price!)
(oh yeah, put on the PCB-right where TJW’s eye sockets are- pads for SMD LEDs to glow/flash/fade[in,out].)

I know this from experience…I have a burn in my ESD pad in the shape of a soldering iron tip, several scars on my hands, a few blown items (some voltage oopsies), a keyboard with a few (still) sticky keys from spillage….you know, the usual.

Besides, if you did have a few the thing probably would’ve worked better. Everyone knows that beer gets easier to open the more you’ve had to drink. After one you go from a proper opener to a Bic, a couple more you can use your teeth, then a few after that it’s just fingernails. I imagine somewhere between bic and teeth a pcb would work just fine.

You are so using those tools wrong. I have to assume that opening bottles is something you are very unfamiliar with. At least here in Finland we learn to open bottles with whatever is at hand. The basic principle of using any kind of object as a bottle opener is using your hand as a pivot. With this method you can use a hammer, screwdriver, pliers, knife, spirit level, lighter, bottle, stapler, hard drive, USB cable, DVI-VGA adapter, 9-volt battery, that container in which a stack of writable CDs/DVDs come in, that heatsink or fan that’s laying on your desk, etc.

I’ve opened bottles even with a beer can and another bottle cap. If you want a specifically manufactured nice bottle opener I suggest hammering a nail or screwing a screw on a piece of wood and using that. It’s probably the most convenient type of bottle opener I know.

You see, this is the problem I’ve got with most of the Arduino clones out there: they try to stuff too much functionality onto the main board. SD readers, Ethernet ports and now beer openers. What’s next, chain saws? This is exactly the kind of function that belongs on its own shield….